October 19, 2009

Fawaz, O’Carroll, Liao, Others Headline Expo Opening

The SCTE will kick off this year’s Cable-Tech Expo with a technology leadership panel full of familiar names, including Marwan Fawaz, CTO and EVP, Charter; Paul Liao, president and CEO, CableLabs; Dermot O’Carroll, SVP engineering, Rogers Cable; and Pragash Pillai, VP engineering and technology, Bresnan.

The technology executives will likely discuss some of their top priorities for the next year. In its October supplement, Communications Executive, the editors of Communications Technology asked some of these leaders what they would be focusing on for the next 12-18 months.

At Rogers Cable, “Number one is performance,” said O’Carroll. “Looking at more and more at performance from a customer perspective, and how we proactively avoid not just outages and failures, but degradation to that experience.”

He also said wireless initiatives would be a priority.

“As wireless ramps up, obviously there’s interest in video and those devices as well,” said O’Carroll.

While Charter is undergoing restructuring as part of its bankruptcy proceeding, CTO Fawaz said it has not hindered the company from serving its customers and service will continue to be a priority.

“We will continue to keep the needs of our customers uppermost as we roll out DOCSIS 3.0 bandwidth initiatives, such as SDV and analog-to-digital migration with DTA solution,” said Fawaz. “We will be also focused on preparing markets for EBIF, OCAP and associated applications.”

A migration to digital with DTAs is relatively new for Charter. Earlier this year Doug Ike, VP of advanced engineering with Charter said the company was interested in moving toward all-digital, but still saw benefits to analog. (For more, click here).

At CableLabs, new president and CEO Liao is focused on helping service providers open up their networks. CableLabs itself is getting a little more open as well. (For more, click here).

“By working together, as well as with other technology partners, we can develop and deploy technologies that will continue to evolve cable networks and operations so as to revolutionize the customer experience,” said Liao.

-Linda Hardesty